comments:
Gematria actually traces its origins to ancient Mesopotamia and Hellenistic Greece. You can read about this fact in several places. The Greek Qabalah is a decent book that shows ancient Greek ruins prove the Greek version of the Qabalah predated the Jewish version by about 1000 years. https://www.amazon.com/Greek-Qabalah-Alphabetical-Mysticism-Numerology/dp/1578631106 Supposedly, the Tree of Life is found in Ancient Egypt's Kemetic tradition, but I only read one book on that out of many possible books and the book I read didn't really show any ruins. It wasn't unconvincing, but it was just different enough that I didn't really want to pursue it. Jews didn't develop the 22 alpha-numeric letters or the idea of gematria and correspondences. It's not hard to understand why it's not a more well-known fact, either, but it helps explain why people who were seriously involved with cross-comparative esotericism realized that this stuff goes back to Egypt. There was a lot of cross-culture with Greek, Egyptian, and Jewish culture. You don't find blatant Qabalah in Egyptian ruins, but you do find it in Greek ruins around the same time period as Ancient Egypt, which is way before the first historically dated Kabballistic text Sefer ha-Bahir in the 12th-century or even the earliest foundational text of Jewish mysticism is the Sefer Yetzirah, which dates somewhere between the 3rd and 6th centuries CE.